Collective Decision-Making
Collective perception allows sparsely distributed agents to form a global view on a common spatially-distributed problem without any direct access to global knowledge and only based on a combination of locally perceived information. However, the evidence gathered from the environment is often subject to spatial correlations and depends on the movements of the agents. The latter is not always easy to control and the main question is how to share and to combine the estimated information to achieve the most precise global estimate in the least possible time. In our recently accepted paper, we aim to answer this question with the help of evidence theory, also known as Dempster-Shafertheory, applied to the collective perception scenario as a collective decision-making problem:
The above figure shows several agents moving in an environment with three colors. The agents do not have any knowledge about the fact which color is the presented by the majority of the units. Only through a local communication, they have to collectively figure it out.
More information:
- Palina Bartashevich and Sanaz Mostaghim
- Multi-Featured Collective Perception with Evidence Theory: Tackling Spatial Correlations
- Accepted. Journal on Swarm Intelligence, 2021